Spatial coding of tactual stimulation.

Abstract

The point has been made many times— most graphically, perhaps, in Brunswik's (1947) lens analogy—that behavior is much more simply predictable from the external situation, i.e., from distal stimuli, than from events at the receptor surface, or proximal stimuli. In at least some cases, it appears that receptor events (as opposed to representatio ns of the world derived from those events) are incapable of entering into associations or forming memory traces. Thus Attneave and Olson (1967) found that when the heads of >9s were tilted after the learning of associates to different line orientations, an invariant relationship between retinal orientation and response produced essentially no transfer; physical or objective invariance, on the other hand, made for practically perfect transfer. A subsequent study by Attneave and Reid (1968) indicated that in such associations the antecedent member is orientation relative to an internal reference system, the vertical of which is normally but not necessarily kept in correspondence with the objective vertical. Whether principles of this sort may be generalized to other modalities, and if so,